El Greco

Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born in 1541 in Candia, today's Heraklion, the capital of Crete, which had been a Venetian colony since 1211. He was trained in the Cretan school of icon painting, a late flowering of Byzantine art, and a document of 1566 already calls him «master Domenigos». Two signed works from these years survive in Greece: the icon Η Κοίμηση της Θεοτόκου (The Dormition of the Virgin) in the church of the Dormition at Ermoupoli on Syros, identified only in 1983, and Ο Ευαγγελιστής Λουκάς ζωγραφίζει την Παναγία (Saint Luke Painting the Virgin) in the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Around 1567 he left for Venice, where he studied the colour and free brushwork of Titian and Tintoretto, and in 1570 moved to Rome, where the miniaturist Giulio Clovio found him lodgings in the Palazzo Farnese. He never won a great commission there, and in 1577 he went to Spain, first to Madrid and then to Toledo, the old religious capital. Toledo gave him his first large altarpieces at once, and he stayed for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, living in a rented palace with his companion Jerónima de las Cuevas and their son Jorge Manuel, born in 1578, who also became a painter.

A hope of working for King Philip II at the Escorial ended when the king disliked The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (1580–82). El Greco stayed in Toledo instead, painting for churches, hospitals and the learned clergy of the city, quarrelling over his fees in court, and reading philosophy. He died there on 7 April 1614.

In Toledo El Greco found his own manner: tall, twisting bodies, faces lit from within, clouds that look torn open, and colours, acid yellows, cold blues, rose and grey-white, that no one else used. Ο Διαμερισμός των ιματίων (El Espolio, The Disrobing of Christ, 1577–79) for Toledo Cathedral was his first Spanish triumph. Η ταφή του κόμη Οργκάθ (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88), still in the church of Santo Tomé for which it was painted, shows Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine lowering the count's body into the tomb while, above, his soul rises into a swirling heaven; a row of Toledo gentlemen in black watches, and the small boy pointing at the scene is the painter's son.

Later works grow freer and stranger. Άποψη του Τολέδο (View of Toledo, c. 1599), now in New York, is one of the first pure landscapes in Western art, a city under a storm sky. Ο Λαοκόων (Laocoön, c. 1610), his only mythological picture, sets the Trojan priest and his sons before the walls of Toledo. Το άνοιγμα της Πέμπτης Σφραγίδας (The Opening of the Fifth Seal, c. 1608–14), with its naked, writhing figures, was studied by Picasso while he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Alongside these come portraits of priests and nobles, and series of saints and apostles painted in his workshop. Spanish critics of the next century called his late style the work of a madman; the Byzantine training behind it, which treats bodies as vessels of light rather than flesh, is what Greeks recognise first.

Greece claims him proudly as Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος. Nikos Kazantzakis, another Cretan, addressed his autobiography Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο (Report to Greco, 1961) to him as to an ancestor. The Historical Museum of Crete in Heraklion owns two early works, The Baptism of Christ and View of Mount Sinai, and the village of Fodele near Heraklion, which claims his birth, has a small El Greco museum. The Benaki Museum in Athens shows Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and an Adoration of the Magi, and Syros keeps the Dormition icon. A park and a street in Heraklion carry his name, and Yannis Smaragdis's film El Greco (2007), with music by Vangelis, was a box-office success in Greece. Anyone visiting Toledo can see the Burial of the Count of Orgaz exactly where he hung it.

• He signed his paintings in Greek letters, often adding «Κρής» (Cretan), even after forty years abroad.
• The Dormition icon on Syros was recognised as his work only in 1983, when a restorer found the signature.
• The boy in the foreground of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is his son Jorge Manuel; a handkerchief in his pocket bears the father's signature and the date 1578, the year of the boy's birth.
• Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) owes its composition to The Opening of the Fifth Seal, which a painter friend of Picasso owned in Paris at the time.